Tuesday election trackers

November 6th, 2017, 9:50pm by Sam Wang

The New Jersey governor’s race is a foregone conclusion – the winner should be Phil Murphy (D), which would give Democrats full control of government.

Virginia governor’s race looks close: Northam (D) leads Gillespie (R) by 2.5 +/- 0.9 % (median +/- SEM, n=4). It’s closer than expected, given that in Virginia, the President’s party (R) usually underperforms the previous year’s Presidential-election performance – and Hillary Clinton won Virginia by 5 percentage points. Note that all of the Virginia House of Delegates (the lower chamber) is up for election. The Virginia Senate, which is narrowly controlled by Republicans, doesn’t have any seats up this time around – that happens in 2019. If Gillespie wins, that raises the possibility of total Republican control over Virginia’s redistricting in 2021. For these reasons, Virginia is worth watching – and getting out the vote. Turnout is key; to follow that, here’s a tracker!

4:48pm: As of 4:00pm, median turnout in the NextGen America precincts has already matched total 2013 turnout. Polls close at 7:00pm.

10:00pm: In Virginia, Northam’s win is headed for 8-10%, larger than expected from polls. It’s a large error, over 6 points…but then again, it would have been weird if Northam had *not* outperformed Clinton’s 5-point win last November. Some in the press are saying it was a huge blow to Trump and the GOP, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a continuation of the longstanding Virginia trend of going against the President’s party one year later.

Strangely foreboding for the Bernie/Warren/DonnaB half of the dem party when the only easy winner of the two big races is a Goldman Sachs millionaire/billionaire while Northam struggles against a dude who embraces Trump …

You mention the House of Delegates – What’s going on there seems extraordinary. As of now (9:42), dems are picking up 11 seats for the majority. So far looks like about 14 incumbent Rs could lose their seats, as opposed to zero incumbent Ds getting booted. A couple of those are on a knife edge at 50/50, so they could still go a different way. But the overall effect seems strong.

Ah, that’s interesting if Sam’s tool doesn’t show gerrymandering in the House of Delegates. Maybe the VA GOP attempted gerrymandering but didn’t execute it effectively. Political folks seem to think it’s gerrymandered: http://wtvr.com/2017/10/17/virginia-gerrymandering/. (This seems to be the standard map-based assessment rather than a statistical test of outcomes.)

I am hankering to see a highly effective, proven gerrymander overwhelmed by a wave, if only because that might create political cover for an independent approach (and statistical tests!).

Naively one would expect a large degree of correlation in gerrymandering of state-level seats and federal-level seats. Since VA congressional districts are gerrymandered, is there some reason to expect the state Delegates not to be?

As shocking as the House of Delegates results are, they still help prove gerrymandering, which was almost overwhelmed by a wave. Aggregate voting for the Delegates have Democrats winning by 9%, but still only about tied in the number of races won. In a non-gerrymandered distribution, they should have won 54 or 55 of the 100 seats.

How much does gerrymandering get eroded by time? The whole idea of gerrymandering is to make partisan districts, but not too partisan because that would be wasting your voters. A perfect gerrymander would make a large number of districts with “50%+epsilon” of your side.

But this kind of thing is extremely susceptible to drift, over the years.

I just crunched the numbers. There were 26 of 100 districts where the Democrats won by default – no Republican candidate. There were 12 districts where the Republicans won by default – no Democratic candidate. Out of 2,450,206 votes, Democrats cast 1,318,249 and Republicans cast 1,069,525, with the rest third party and write-in. Democrats “wasted” over half of their votes, along with Republicans’ wasted votes, gives an efficiency gap of 11%.

The actual gerrymanderers use stats which are more like PVI than like the results for the district level candidates. If Virginia provides delegate-district level governor results, that would be a fine proxy.